Picking the Tulips - Iron County Courthouse

Picking the Tulips - Iron County Courthouse

Little girl still in pink winter coat with hood kneels to pick a tulip as sunlight breaks through an early spring storm at the county seat, rural Ironton, Missouri. The rustic, antebellum Iron County Courthouse is one of the oldest nationally in use. Mother with daughter at left pace happily into view as doves alight in foreground.

The painting attempts to highlight the human problem of law vs. mercy as tackled endlessly throughout both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and, especially in the NT book of Romans - of when to be unforgiving and when to be patient, kind and merciful. The courthouse represents the law through which happiness could theoretically exist (O.T. law), e.g., the safety of the mother with daughter at left. But the little girl picking the tulip near the foreground poses a problem: She is trespassing on private property. Finally, as a test of this “forgiveness”, the foreground brick pilaster at right is deliberately painted out of perspective - the brickwork and white capstone are lined up wrong - to see if any counterbalance of the overall “effect” of the painting is enough to forgive the artist this faux pas - i.e., am I “lovable enough” to be forgiven my sins? Aside from metaphor based on this problem of forgiveness, my hope artistically was to complete a landscape that is both interesting and perhaps inspiring, of a subject I grew up walking past on the way to school and now drive past nearly every day.

21” x 29”, watercolor with India ink on 300 lb. Arches cold press watercolor paper.

Picking the Tulips - Iron County Courthouse belongs to the following groups:

Childhood, Descriptions, Fine Arts Influenced by Literature, Impressionism Café, Impressionist Art, Landscape Painting, Mixed Media, Nostalgic Art and Photography, Painters In Modern Times, Prize Challenges!!, Religious Art & Photography, Remember When, Rustic and Water Media (Paintings by hand only) Available for sale as

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